Baseline and accelerant

The barely-there line between the misogyny that murdered Rebecca Cheptegei and the threats to WNBA athletes.

There’s a Germaine Greer quote I’ve seen circulating this week: Women fail to understand how much men hate them.

Mostly I’ve seen it used as a one line explainer paired with collages of screencapped headlines detailing horrific instances of violence against women, or as a one line reply to the same news items, shared individually. The tone going from earnest to tongue-in-cheek (e.g. “We know”).

The quote can still be a shocking one, even if you agree with it, even if you feel pangs of its familiarity in your body. Jolting. It is unequivocal, plain — Greer’s signature delivery — an absolute. Part of what made it so shocking in its time is that women weren’t expected to be so blunt, so assertive. Still aren’t. Part of where Greer’s politics have aged poorly is in her unilateralism, with intersectionality an afterthought in practice and concept. It’s where most politics age poorly, but the fact of this line’s power to jolt, as I kept seeing it pop up, illuminates an urgency and frustration.

The urgency is that women are being killed, brutally murdered, that they’re being violently assaulted; the frustration is from the hierarchy of misogyny we’ve made passable in not speaking plainly.

Rebecca Cheptegei, doused in gasoline by her ex-boyfriend and set on fire in front of her two children on September 5th. Her neighbours said they heard Cheptegei’s screams for help and as they went running for water, her ex-boyfriend poured more gasoline onto her body. Cheptegei just returned from the Paris Olympics and is the fourth elite female athlete murdered in Kenya in the last three years.

Kara Welsh, a college gymnast, was shot eight times by her boyfriend on September 6th. Eleven empty bullet casings were collected inside the apartment where Welsh’s body was found, curled in a fetal position.

I’m sticking to athletes for the sake of subject but the week has seemed bleaker than normal — Gisèle Pélicot’s testimony, reports of a spike in searches for footage of the rape and murder of a Kolkata doctor — when it comes to blatant, horrifying evidence of misogyny and hatred of women. When I learned about Cheptegei’s death I thought immediately of the death threats made earlier this week by, primarily, Caitlin Clark fans to Diamond DeShields, or the threats earlier this season against Angel Reese and Aliyah Boston, or the stalking of Paige Bueckers. It wasn’t a big mental leap. Nor is it some giant chasm between threats of violence and perpetrated violence to pundits like Charles Barkley or Pat McAfee equating hard fouls — any foul — in the WNBA against Clark to jealousy from other players, or referring to W athletes as “girls”. Claiming that W athletes have blown the best thing that could’ve happened to their league by “being petty” and playing Clark as competitively as they would anyone else, or projecting the need for protection of Clark, who just two nights ago recorded her own fifth technical foul of the season.

These are gendered reads, expressed through gendered language, the purpose of which is othering women. In that othering — beyond making it easy to discuss women stripped of their autonomy — comes an essential deconstruction of personhood, and it’s in that erasure where the capacity for harm loses its hard outline. Conditions grow permeable, permissible.

Language matters. It’s what the Greer quote reminded me of. That misogyny can be passed off as harmless, like when fans make death threats against W athletes, or when misogyny becomes part of the job, like when Barkley and McAfee and many (many) others offer half-baked takes because they can’t bother to think for an extra beat, or get their language right, or listen to criticism without becoming defensive, speaks to its pervasiveness.

We’ve created informal ways to hate women, deemed passable partly because there are so many that it’s become impossible to push back on them. What you glean by spending two minutes in the comments section of almost any WNBA content is that it’s fine to hate women for becoming too successful, for flaunting talent or material gain, because these things offer buffers, make women “fair game”. That it’s fine to hate women for appearing to hate other women, or expressing an opinion about the sport in which they are professionals or about another professional within the same sport. That it’s fine to hate women for showing emotion, for showing their physical capabilities on court, for occasionally running into another woman while doing so. It’s fine to hate women who invite competition, invite challenge, who taunt and who love to be taunted. It’s fine to hate women who point out the hatred of women, whether because it is in relation to their job, persona safety, livelihood, or maybe just because they’re sick of seeing it all the fucking time.

There aren’t “tiers” to misogyny. We’ve created casual footholds and in doing so, have made it so efforts to point it out appear extreme. It’s gaslighting, it’s the frog boil of patriarchy, it’s every method of suppression you’ve already heard of and yet it persists because it’s overwhelming, or we’re dulled to it, or like an invasive species that’s established a foothold there’s no going back to a time before it existed. It’s everything.

I wrote a tweet about this while thinking of how little space there was between Cheptegei and her ex-boyfriend getting in an argument (passable, mundane) and Cheptegei being soaked in gasoline and set on fire. Of how the language of her murder was buffed in so many stories about it. She had succumbed to her injuries, she had died, she passed away in hospital. Passive. What happened to her versus what was done to her, and why. I thought of the space because I could already see the feet and shoulders wedged in it by people considering it a distant threat, who racialized it and considered it impossible in a westernized context, who thought perhaps there had to be more to the story, who refuse to recognize a hatred of women can be both the baseline and the accelerant — one and the same.

The reply I got, because I mentioned other WNBA athletes and neglected to include Caitlin Clark, was what about the death threats on Clark? Was I dense?

The tier is well and truly intact.

The irony is the only other group of people we tend to other like we do women, or groups of people we actively want to remove agency and personhood from, are athletes.

It’s strange to listen to pro sports discourse, to broadcasts and commentary, to read stories, to overhear fan conversation, and recognize its familiar methods of casual obliteration because you’ve experienced it firsthand. The reduction of an athlete to physical attributes and capabilities, the numerical ranking of people in response to these attributes, the material assignment of worth dependent on performance. The creation of arbitrary hierarchies — who is good, bad, overrated, who can be eliminated. People devolved to the negative, considered burdens and liabilities, entities only getting in the way.

It feels odd to credit Greer for her quote’s accuracy all these years later (she wrote it for The Female Eunuch, published in 1970) given that she was naming an entrenched system, a failing system, but a system in which we still live. For a little while women’s agency, safety, and inclusion felt urgent. Pressing. That urgency has waned and a kind of malaise has replaced it. A sense that there’s nothing to be done.

Another Greer quote: Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men, it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.

To contextualize this once more in sports, with athletes, idealism does nothing for the tangible growth and security (career and bodily) of women athletes. What serves is recognition, both material and perceptive. The growth of the WNBA in league expansion, bigger broadcast deals, revenue sharing — these are tangible. Clark’s undoubtably played a part, but we don’t consistently tell NBA athletes they owe their livelihoods to LeBron James or Steph Curry. Athlete-led initiatives like Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart’s new 3-on-3 league, Unrivaled, is a big step in the direction of autonomy and differentiation.

Siloing, narrowing of scope, pitting one entity against another, are tools of fear. So is patriarchy, misogyny. To speak plainly, to welcome jolts that force us to action, consideration, to call out in a world that can feel determined to numb, might be a small kind of courage, but is courage all the same.